Post-purchase rationalization. This cognitive bias seeks to reduce regret, and it’s based on a fairly common consumer behavior.
Say you’re shopping for home theatre equipment. You go to a showroom and see a couple different models. One’s extremely expensive, features a lot of bells and whistles, and takes up a lot of space. The other’s a bit cheaper and smaller, but to the naked ear, doesn’t seem to be much different in terms of quality.
You might be persuaded to buy the bigger and more expensive one because, since it’s bigger and more expensive, it must work better. But it puts a serious dent in your bank account and is too big for your living room. And you might not even really be able to tell how well the sound’s working.
If you employed post-purchase rationalization, you’d convince yourself that you made the right decision, that it’s what you wanted to do all along. You tell yourself that you can indeed hear the difference in sound, and you do indeed need fifteen different plugs and ports. You might know deep down inside that you went overboard, but that knowledge makes you uneasy. Regret makes you feel stupid, and no one likes that. So you talk yourself into believing that you did the right thing and got exactly what you wanted. No more regret, just eating boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner for the next two months because you spent so much on new speakers.
This type of post-anything justifying behavior extends far beyond purchases. Remember clear thinking’s biggest enemy, the ego? This is where it returns. We do this sometimes when we defend ourselves from others, but here, instead of trying to convince someone else, we are trying to convince ourselves.
So how do we work to improve our perception and avoid being led astray by our shortcutting brain?
Of course, you can start immediately trying to be aware of them in your thinking and take note of how your perception is likely focused on speed rather than accuracy. But still, that feels inadequate against some of these thought patterns that have been left unchecked our entire lives. There are a few specific mental exercises that can help retrain your thinking to be clear-minded and measured.
Practice thinking of alternative explanations. Instead of making a snap decision, alter your focus to accuracy and not speed. Take your time. Stop feeling anxious just because there is uncertainty or the lack of a clear decision. Don’t write the story immediately.
Try to think of multiple reasons or causes. Reserve your judgment and stop jumping to conclusions. For example, if you’re sitting in your favorite coffee shop and you notice a huge drop-off in business, you might think it’s because the quality of the coffee has declined. But it could also be because more people are making their own espresso drinks, or because it’s summer and more people are doing other things outside. Or perhaps it’s that the prices the store is charging are keeping people away.
In a sense, this is like reverse storytelling. In life, we often start with the conclusion and try to work backward. Instead of filling in all the blanks and identifying only one path to that conclusion, try to work backward and theorize multiple paths.
You might try an exercise of taking a scene, a person, or any other thing, and observing five details or characteristics about it. Then, for each of those details, write down five possible causes that may have led that particular detail to be the way it is. Try to vary the potential causes you list, ranging from the plainly realistic to the downright bizarre. This will train your ability to create a story around every detail, thus giving you twenty-five trains of thought instead of the quickest and easiest for your brain to process.
Most of us think only linearly in terms of cause and effect. But that’s ineffective at best to understanding a situation.
Reword your statements as questions. Think of something you consider a declarative, absolute truth. For example: “E-books and e-readers are killing literature.” That’s a pretty strong statement. But try rephrasing it: “Are e-books and e-readers really killing literature?” The mere act of turning it into a question makes your brain start looking for answers. Instead of a conclusion, you’ve opened up a line of inquiry.
“Well, maybe e-readers are bringing more people to reading—that’s good.” “They may be changing how we read, but they’re not really killing how literature is made. Maybe I’m just overly sentimental about physical books.” With just that one change to your statement, you’ve opened up your mind to a new line of inquiry and exploration.
Even the six blind men could have benefitted from this. Instead of the one standing next to the elephant’s tail saying, “I am definitely standing next to a willow tree,” the situation would have been much improved by asking, “Why does it feel like I am standing by a willow tree?”
Get behind and challenge your assumptions. Let’s say you have a very broad belief about poor people: “They’re poor because they don’t want to work.” Challenge that assumption immediately: “Do poor people just not want to work? Or do they really have fewer opportunities? They’ve been closing plants and stores in town for a few years now—maybe they don’t have anywhere else to go. And it’s hard to get the proper training for a skilled position when you can’t afford it . . . What if there is something else that causes it? What if there are about fifty shades of grey to this matter?” Am I saying something that fundamentally depends on an untested assumption?
The harsh truth is that whatever you think you know about a topic, especially if it involves people’s thoughts and motivations, you probably know only about ten percent of what’s truly happening.
It’s always best to be proactive about challenging your assumptions through self-interrogation and especially through valid news and information sources—including people who really have deep experience in the subject you’re thinking of. It’s uncertain where many of our assumptions come from anyway, so it’s good to reevaluate them from time to time.
Remove your need to be right. The truth is a separate pursuit entirely from this, and sometimes there is a stark contrast because you want to feel a certain way about yourself, especially in front of others. Truth becomes a lot easier to discern when you take your emotional rewards (and punishments) out of the equation and simply try to determine what’s real.
If you face opposition, it’s just going to cause you to dig your heels in and deny, defend, and stonewall. You’ll be seduced into caring more about dominating someone than understanding. You’ll want to avoid that sour feeling of shame when conceding defeat to someone—anyone. Even if you’re right, very few people make friends by saying, “I told you so.”
Picture how a desperately stubborn person would act—is that similar to how you are acting? Could anyone make an honest comparison between the two? Hopefully not.
Even more so, explore being wrong and understand the feelings that are evoked. Play out scenarios where you are indeed wrong. What feelings will you feel? There may be embarrassment, anger, humiliation, or shame—but do they affect the world or your life? Only if you let them. Perception is only biased if you allow it to remain unchallenged.
